This morning, Peter and I were off in another neighbourhood and smelled the irresistable smell of roasting coffee. We were getting peckish anyhow, so we stuck our heads into the coffee shop to see what was happening. We discovered this amazing machine.
Peter struck up a conersation with the roaster and we learned all sorts of things about roasting, colour and roasting decaf!
Peter and I love to roast our own coffee beans and Peter managed to convince the guy to sell us some of his (they’re surprisingly hard to find.)
Thanks to The Beanery!

A couple of weeks in a row now, two of my friends have come over to my place and we’ve started cooking together. One hasn’t had very much experience with cooking and she asked if I could help her learn how to make some things. That’s how it started. It’s always a good time of drinking coffee and tea and sharing our unemployed stories (neither of them are currently working either).

Creaming the Sugar, Butter and Eggs

We started off with blueberry muffins and chocolate zucchini pineapple muffins. The blueberry muffins were amazing and jam-packed with blueberries. The chocolate zucchini muffins were good, but not as amazing as the blueberry muffins.

Chopping the Nuts

This week, we made chocolate chip cookies. For a long time I had been looking for the perfect chocolate chip cookie recipe. Something crispy on the edges, and soft in the middle. I found it a while back somewhere on the internet (not entirely sure where) and now I will share it with you.

Spooning Out the Batter

As this is a weekly thing that we’re doing, I’m hoping to get my fellow bakers to do some guest posts about learning to cook with me! I might also teach them to knit. But that’s a project for another week.

The cookies were perfect. We didn’t stir in the nuts until we had already cooked a dozen so that we could have some nut-free cookies. We accidentally made them GIANT and they turned into a giant pan cookie. Or, as we called them, Cakies. Still, they were delicious. But we learned from that and made the cookies smaller in the next batches.

Cakies

The Best Ever Chocolate Chip Cookies

Ingredients:

1 cup butter, softened

1 cup white sugar

1 cup packed brown sugar

2 eggs

2 teaspoons vanilla extract

3 cups all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

2 teaspoons hot water

1/2 teaspoon salt

2 cups semisweet chocolate chips

1 cup walnuts

Directions:

1. preheat oven to 350 degrees

2. Cream together the butter, white sugar, and brown sugar until smooth. Beat in the eggs one at a time, then stir in the vanilla. Dissolve baking soda in hot water. Add to the batter along with the salt and stir. Stir in flour, chocolate chips and nuts. Drop by not-too-large spoonfuls onto ungreased baking sheets.

3. Bake for about 10 minutes or until edges are nicely browned. Let them cool on the pan for a minute or two, otherwise they break when you try to lift them off.

It was my first wedding anniversary with my husband this last weekend and we went on an adventure together down the coast of California.

We left without much of a plan on Friday night, found places along the way to stay and saw lots of interesting things.

The California coast is beautiful. Lots of rolling hills, mountains, greenery, ocean and neat little places to stop and gaze at the ocean.

We went to Hearst Castle. What a strange experience that was. Reminiscent of Versailles, and other museums and castles in Europe, but built in the last hundred years. This room was my favourite. I wish I could swim in this pool.

We stopped and wondered at the Elephant Seals. These mammals are shear ridiculousness.

We ate lots of good food, drank some good wine, and generally enjoyed each other’s company.

Check it out! The first harvest of my multicolour beans! There are green beans, purple beans and yellow beans. Why are they so curly? I have no idea. They just are. My plans are to make a bean, corn, tomato, mozzarella, basil salad with them and things i bought at the farmer’s market this morning. Nom nom nom.